This study tested the proposition that deficient decision making under stress is due, to a significant extent, to the individual's failure to fulfill adequately an elementary requirement of the decision-making process, that is, the systematic consideration of all relevant alternatives. One hundred one undergraduate students (59 women and 42 men), aged 20-40, served as subjects in this experiment. They were requested to solve decision problems, using an interactive computer paradigm, while being exposed to controllable stress, uncontrollable stress, or no stress at all. There was no time constraint for the performance of the task. The controllability of the stressor was found to have no effect on the participants ' performance. However, those who were exposed to either controllable or uncontrollable stress showed a significantly stronger tendency to offer solutions before all available alternatives had been considered and to scan their alternatives in a nonsystematic fashion than did participants who were not exposed to stress. In addition, patterns of alternative scanning were found to be correlated with the correctness of solutions to decision problems. The analysis of historical evidence (Holsti, 1972; Levi & Tet-lock, 1980), behavior observations (Janis, 1982; Kasl & Cobb, 1966), and experimental data (Broadbent, 1971; Sieber, 1974)

Three experiments evaluated whether facial expression can modulate the allocation of focused attention. Identification of emotionally expressive target faces was typi-cally faster when they were flanked by identical (compatible) faces compared with when they were flanked by different (incompatible) faces. This flanker compat-ibility effect was significantly smaller when target faces expressed negative com-pared with positive emotion (see Experiment 1A); however, when the faces were altered to disrupt emotional expression, yet retain feature differences, equal flanker compatibility effects were observed (see Experiment 1B). The flanker-compatibility effect was also found to be smaller for negative target faces compared with neutral target faces, and for both negative and neutral target faces compared with positive target faces (see Experiment 2). These results suggest that the con-striction of attention is influenced by facial expressions of emotion. The need for selective attention arises from a lim-ited capacity to process perceptual information. Be-cause information that is selected for further process-ing ultimately guides thoughts and actions, it is critical for attention to be allocated to information that has relevance for behavioral goals. As a result, certain information sources play a relatively large role in de-termining how attentional resources are allocated, as a function of their potential relevance. For example, faces, which are very meaningful sources of social and biological information, have been shown to re-ceive preferential processing by biasing the allocation of attention to themselves (e.g., Ro, Russell, & Lavie, 2001; Vuilleumier, 2000). There is also a growing body of research demonstrating that facial expression of emotion modulates the allocation of selective at-

Much research indicates that experiencing emotional arousal (such as when hearing a loud gunshot) modifies perception, memory encoding and decision processes. But effects of arousal range from enhancing to impairing across different paradigms and stimuli and canonical models of emotional arousal cannot explain both the enhancing and impairing effects. In this talk, I will make the case that arousal biases neural competition to enhance high priority information and suppress low priority information.

Abstract not found

Under conditions of extreme and life-threatening stress, people often report dis-tortions of time. These distortional experiences are critical since, axiomatically, they occur in circumstances where small variations in behavior can mean the difference between survival and extinction. The present work examines the spectrum of evidence concerning such phenomena including observations from real-world events such as combat, ejection from high-performance aircraft, driv-ing in dangerous environments and from less stressful, yet informative laboratory procedures. A contextual theory is promulgated which postulates that in addition to draining attentional resources, stress prevents the efficient production of such resources. The stress-depleted resources which remain are directed to task-relevant activities and consequently attention to time-based cues is minimized resulting in distortion effects for both time-in-passing and for time recollection in memory. A number of practical observations are advanced concerning the performance of professionals who are likely to meet such conditions in their occupations including those in aerospace, military, fire-fighting, law enforcement, and medical emergency service operations. In conclusion, we present a number of future research strategies that may be enacted in order to evaluate this ephemeral, real-world phenomenon.

Two studies were conducted to investigate the effects of a victim's physical salience and perceivers ' arousal on perceptions of a verbally aggressive inter-action. Based upon evidence that there is a tendency to attribute causality to salient stimulus persons and to form more evaluatively extreme impressions of such persons, it was predicted that an aggressor's behavior would be attributed more to causes in a physically salient than a nonsalient victim and that the be-havior of a salient victim would be evaluated more extremely than that of a nonsalient victim. Based upon Easterbrook's hypothesis that arousal narrows the focus of attention to the most salient cues in the situation, it was further pre-dicted that aroused perceivers would manifest both a stronger tendency to attribute causality to a physically salient victim of aggression and more extreme ratings of the stimulus persons than would nonaroused perceivers. The results supported all of the experimental hypotheses except one: The tendency to at-tribute the aggressor's behavior more to a physically salient than a nonsalient victim was not greater for aroused than for nonaroused perceivers. Recent research has revealed a surprisingly strong tendency for our social perceptions to be influenced by the relative salience of people and their environments. One finding is that salient stimuli tend to be perceived as causing the events in a social situation. This effect has been documented in a number of studies em-ploying salience manipulations derived from Gestalt laws of "figural emphasis, " which hold that certain stimuli tend to be seen as figural or to stand out from their surroundings. For ex-The research reported in this article was supported

It is a truism of everyday life that anger and fear affect cognition. In high-risk perceptually complex contexts, such as air combat, the effects of negative arousal on performance can be significant and potentially catastrophic. To better understand the interaction between emotion and cognition, we studied the effects of negative emotional stimuli on pre-attentive sensorimotor gating and selective attention in 39 healthy adults, as well as their relationship to neural, cardiac, and endocrine variables associated with the arousal response. Subjects were tested for pre-pulse inhibition under neutral and arousal conditions, as well as on emotionally-valent Flanker and Stroop tasks. Physiological arousal reactivity was measured using functional MRI, 24-hour EKG, electrodermal activity, cortisol testing, and dexamethasone suppression. Subjects were

Over 60 years of research has led to a law-like acceptance of the Easterbrook (1959) hypothesis. Easterbrook (1959) famously reviewed the evidence on the arousal-attention link and concluded that as arousal increases, the range of cues utilized decreases, and the focus of attention narrows. However, the present set of eight studies suggests that the Easterbrook hypothesis needs to be seriously qualified. Recent developments in the understanding of the role of arousal in information processing suggests that rather than invariably leading to a focus of attention, arousal instead serves as information regarding the urgency and/or importance of active processing strategies (Storbeck & Clore, 2008). Because some processing strategies lead to a broadening of attention, arousal should sometimes be negatively related to a focusing of attention. A first set of four studies investigated the need for closure as it relates to the arousal-attention link. The need for closure refers to the motivation to make quick, firm judgments, and has been shown to lead to the use of fewer available cues. Because of this, it seems that the need for closure should lead to a tendency to focus one’s attention. However, when need for closure is low, individuals tend to

Economic and environmental problems are acute stressors for the lower socio-economic class residing in the urban Indian slums. This article endeavours to explore the way in which slum dwellers subjectively perceive these stressors daily confronted by them. Data was collected on 280 slum respondents of Delhi and Allahabad Results showed that at the perceptual level both the economic and environmental stressors were not correlated Further, results indicated that respondents reported acute poverty but they failed to perceive the deteriorating environmental conditions. The tzvo pervasive problems which a developing country like India faces are the ever growing poverty and the fast degradation of the environment. Poverty and environmental degradation appear to be closely associated (through the imperatives of food, fuel and fodder production), and so are poverty and population growth (due to rising unemployment and falling labour income causing increased risk of destitution). The population of India is rising at the rate of 2.1 % but with only 1.6 % increase in the per capita income, hence a large section of its population lives in poverty. In

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